On the conversation of how technology has been screwing over Black folks, let’s take Madeline-Michelle Carthen for a perfect, decades-old example. The Missouri woman had been fighting to prove to the government that she is in fact alive and not dead thanks to an error by the Social Security Administration.
Carthen has been explaining her story to various news outlets, including laying down what the issue is behind this bizarre yet haunting scenario.
In 2007, she told reporters at KSDK that she realized her financial aid application to Webster University had been denied. On her paperwork, she was classified as deceased. That meant she had to prove to the school she wasn’t actually dead or part of some crazy scam. It didn’t take long after that for everything else tied to her identity to suddenly become null and void.
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She couldn’t graduate, and nearly two decades later, nothing has gotten easier.
“It messed up my whole life,” Carthen said. “... It’s impacted my life, financially. If I wanted to buy a house, that won’t happen.”
She said she can’t get a mortgage, and even keeping a job is nearly impossible.
“It’s just a matter before my Social Security number catches up with me, and then they have to let me go … H.R. can’t process payroll,” she said.
The Death Master File
Turns out Carthen isn’t the only one facing this problem. In a 2019 report released by the Social Security Advisory Board, the agency found that between 7,000 to 12,000 people are wrongfully recorded as dead by the SSA nnually. Though the number of reports has “generally decreased over time,” as the board wrote, that doesn’t help cases like Carthen who is still trying to get back on grid nearly two decades later.
She received little to no help after seeking the Executive Branch and various government officials, per PEOPLE’s report. She filed a lawsuit the same year the SSAB report came out. However, it was dismissed due to the government’s sovereign immunity (the government can’t be sued without its consent).
New Name, New Problems
By 2021, she decided to change her name from the original Madeline Coburn and was able to obtain a new SSN but even more sloppy mistakes got in the way of that too. She told PEOPLE her name is spelled incorrectly on the court order and her SSN is incorrect on an online hub for employee verification. She also can’t sign off on her son’s FAFSA papers or vote in any elections.
There’s still no answer as to how the SSA decided she was dead. According to the agency’s report, it could be as easy as a spouse or neighbor reporting her death to the SSA. Yet, there’s no clear solution to how the problem can be fixed despite her exhausting every resource.
“I just know I’m alive. I don’t care what A.I. says or software says, but I’m alive. But it’s hard to prove that,” she told NBC News last month.